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The Shepherd and the Star - Part XIII
‘There’s no chance they didn’t hear those shots. We better get moving, and Captain,’ the Commander slid her pistol away ‘don’t ever fire without my order or the next shell is yours.’ He gave a short nod as she tore a small device from her belt and hit one of the several switches on it. The entrance to their transport above sealed shut and severed the rope. She caught it, wrapped it up and tucked it around her belt before she turned towards a set of wooden doors, the only apparent exit to the chamber. *‘Wait, Commander. This room, I mean look at it,’ he whispered loudly ‘what do you suppose it’s for?’ She merely turned back and shook her head. *‘We don’t have time to sit and study. Come on.’ She ordered. He nodded again, shook off his unexpected interest and followed. The Captain, like the Commander and the General, had defective neural implants now too. He was feeling emotions, actions and reactions for the very first time. It wasn’t overpowering, but he suddenly felt very changed. He could only show this through movement and tone of voice however as his body was sealed inside a thick black suit of combat armour. His visor was lit up, but it was merely a blank grey slate. It hummed each time he brightened its settings to see, but not so loud as to give their position away. It was gentle, and quite odd attribute for a suit constructed for warfare. He knew that he had seriously antagonised her by choosing his side to the extent which he did, but he sensed deep down that the other two agents weren’t like him. They would never have shown her the compassion which he did, as they probably never chose to embrace their new emotional system. Emotions only complicated things, but emotions made people sentient and aware. He could see now by the Agency would have forbid such things in their soldiers, and he could now disagree with their reasons. Now, he thought, emotions were necessary after all. He considered whether any typical emotionless agent have come this far. Well, that much was debatable at the very least. The Commander pressed a hand against one of the doors and felt the wood whimper as she very delicately patted it open. It was weak, and did not require anymore zeal to concede other than that. She thought it peculiar that on a spaceship as vast and alien as this one that wood would be of use, but that was only the first thing she discovered. --- A couple of stretched decks below, a soldier slammed his head back into the arched wall of a dark and bloody hallway as his body slid down and hit the dust of the floor. He lay motionless, surrounded by the freshly cut limbs and corpses of his former comrades. The lights still flickered, as if power was still struggling to regain control of the vessel, as the soldier held his final breath and tried to keep his organs from dropping out of the slits across his armour. He was dead only seconds later, and the last thing he heard was a series of metal objects retracting back into the ceiling. His radio buzzed. *‘This is the General. Is anyone receiving this? Where are you?’ On the same deck, a few hallways away, the General stood before another heap of familiar bodies with her team as she shouted into the radio once more, before she tossed it back to the nervous squad leader. She kneeled down, turned one of the corpses over and examined his countless cuts and bruises. *‘Do you think there’s someone else aboard? I mean, like, an alien? Or was it the Commander? Why would she do this?’ he asked as he closed the eyes of one of his former soldiers. *‘I don’t know, but it’s not in her nature. It’s possible there are aliens aboard, but we didn’t detect them. In fact, there’s a lot that we didn’t detect coming in,’ she said and looked up ‘unless this was planned.’ *‘Planned?’ he repeated ‘What do you mean? I thought you said that this ship was abandoned!’ *‘Yeah, it looks that way, doesn’t it? It looks adrift. It looks like it isn’t going in any particular direction, but then why is it going so fast?’ she raised the point and stood up. *‘I thought we agreed that it had gathered speed because it looked as if it had been falling for so long!’ he fought back. *‘That’s possible, but right now anything’s possible. What we do know is not a lot but,’ she flicked two objects at the rear of her neck binder, slid off her helmet and let her blonde hair drop down behind her ‘there’s oxygen, clean oxygen. So tell me, why would there be oxygen on a spaceship constructed by alien life forms?’ There was just a silence as the remaining soldiers shared untrusting glances at one another, whilst the General shoved her helmet beneath her arm and stared up at the shining emblem high up on the wall. *‘This symbol...It’s all over the place, and it’s gleaming,’ she stated and observed her reflection through it ‘aren’t any of you curious about any of this?’ *‘We’re here because we believe in your revolution, not to study. We’re running out of time, General!’ the squad leader spoke for the survivors. *‘Time, really?’ she shot back ‘and why is that? All we need to do is figure out how to turn this thing around, take control. Time doesn’t matter. Even if she continues to fall out of the solar system, we’ll just fly her right back into it and right back to Earth. There’s no limit, we do what have to do no matter how long it takes.’ *‘You sound like you’re still an agent.’ He said loudly and struck a nerve just as she was about to turn away. --- The young girl suddenly froze as she strolled bare-footed through an empty, dust-soaked hallway when a loud bang echoed from far behind her. She looked over her shoulder, realised that she was not alone on this floor any longer and turned to move again. She retained her stillness as she recognised that she was amidst a steep junction, with three hallways travelling off to different directions. She breathed fast and heavily in alarm as she heard a soft patter of footsteps hurry into motion in the distance. She looked down the closest corridor, prepared to run, then suddenly changed her mind, leapt for the second closest and broke into a sprint, kicking the dust around as she ran. As she turned a corner, she heard the hatch far behind her unlock and creak open as a group of strangers pounced in with their weapons held ready, but she was already out of sight. The General shoved another round into her pistol after she tore out the smouldering remains of the previous and stepped to the front of the two remaining soldiers by each side. *‘I’d like to thank you both for helping me to take care of that idiot and his followers. They would have just got in the way,’ she smiled, productively reloaded her weapon and sighed happily ‘viva la revolution?’ The girl continued around several corners as she journeyed deeper into the ship, eventually passing through another hatch and slamming it shut behind her. The lights of the next room resonated back to life and, as before, she remained still with her back to the hatch. She closed her eyes and then ultimately sank to her knees. Ancient skeletons littered the chamber, each with weapons and each with limbs missing. The hologram was right. All of this had occurred before. Humanoid beings had boarded, just as they had done now, and they were cut down by someone or something. She knew somehow that the same thing was destined to happen again, from the tattered remnants of her mind she knew, but she was brave. Oxygen gushed up her nose and down her throat as she slid her eyelids open, very cautiously pulled herself up and looked above the humanoid remains. This chamber was different to the others she had encountered, shaped like a cube with short metal walls of equal width and length faced inward. Each of them had an identical pair of lines engraved on, and as soon as she stood up the lines suddenly lit up, as if provoked. A slow droning began and her lip quivered in response, then the entire room began to tremble. The skeletal fragments, the skulls, ribs and bones started to shake as the floor beneath them juddered. It was then that a bright red beam dropped down from the ceiling and fell over her. She closed her eyes again as the scan initiated and the chamber stopped shaking. The technology was old and took a lot of power to run the most basic of functions but even so, she sensed that something was watching her. She felt her feet wander forward, pull her away from the safety of the hatch and experienced one arm reach down as the scan beam followed her every move. She had picked up something from near the corpses, but she didn’t know what or why. *‘M-Malfunction...’ she heard a mechanical voice cry out from the corner of the room and launched the object at full speed. Upon opening her eyes, she saw the ancient combat knife swirl towards a small unassuming console between two walls just as the walls themselves began to retract and reveal hundreds of spikes hidden cleverly beneath. The combat knife slashed into the main node of the console and she heard a large sound echo out from it as the power died and the walls returned to their original positions. The girl, amazed by her strange actions, turned her hand and noticed a pile of dust slip through her fingers. She moaned slightly and leapt back with her back faced to the hatch as the lights started to dim, then she heard something from the previous hallway. *‘It’s coming from this way...’ someone yelled. That was her single motivation for once again breaking into a sprint. She launched herself across the chamber and through the next hatch, just as the power gently returned to the small machine as soon as the combat knife slid out of the central node. *‘Bio-stamp recognised. Unit malfunctioning. Traps in sector 4 deactivated.’ it tenderly cried. in Part XIV]